The practice of PHP… And more!

If you use Docker on Windows (either the native version or via Virtual Box), you probably aren’t too impressed with the Docker Quick Start shell. The good news is that you can create a task in the amazing ConEmu Windows terminal/shell wrapper utility.

In ConEmu, open the Tasks settings window by either selecting Setup tasks… from the New Console menu (with the green + button) or using the <Win>+<Alt>+T keyboard shortcut.

Add a new task by pressing the + button.

Change the name of the task as desired (e.g., “Docker Quick Start”) and enter the following values.

You probably know that in Ubuntu/Debian, you should not run as the root user, but should use the sudo command instead to run commands that require root privileges. However, it can also be inconvenient to have to enter your password every time that you use sudo. Here’s a quick fix that removes the requirement to enter you password for sudo.

Open the /etc/sudoers file (as root, of course!) by running:

sudo visudo

You should never edit /etc/sudoers with a regular text editor, such as Vim or nano, because they do not validate the syntax like the visudo editor.

At the end of the /etc/sudoers file add this line:

username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Replace username with your account username, of course. Save the file and exit with <ESC>wq. If you have any sort of syntax problem, visudo will warn you and you can abort the change or open the file for editing again.

It is important to add this line at the end of the file, so that the other permissions do not override this directive, since they are processed in order.

Finally, open a new terminal window and run a command that requires root privileges, such as sudo apt-get update. You should not be prompted for your password!

While most people develop Laravel applications on the excellent Homestead platform, which uses Nginx for the HTTP server, I still prefer to use Apache 2 HTTP server, because it is most widely supported, especially on shared hosting. Accordingly, I frequently set up Linux hosts, such as Vagrant boxes, to run Laravel with Apache. Here are the key (and sometimes easy to overlook!) steps.

By using Ondrej Sury‘s PPA for PHP, you can install PHP 5.5, 5.6, or 7.0 (and soon 7.1!) or any combination. See this article for more details. Specifically, to install PHP 7.0 instead of 5.6, just replace each instance of php5.6 with php7.0 above.

Also, note that using debconf-set-selections utility allows us to install MySQL without being prompted for the root password. In this case, we set the password to mysql_password, but you probably want to use something else.

Enable mod_rewrite for Apache.

One of the most frequently encountered difficulties when starting with Laravel on Apache HTTP server is that the mod_rewrite extension is not enabled. Laravel requires mode_rewrite to properly transform URLs to be interpreted by its routing function via .htaccess. On some Ubuntu platforms, mod_rewrite will be enabled by default, but for enhanced security, the default is now for it to be disabled. To enablemod_rewrite extension, run:

The last command (apachectl) should return rewrite_module (shared). If this is not returned, then some failure occurred with the installation or configuration of mod_rewrite extension.

Install Composer globally.

The Laravel framework (and most recent PHP packages) use the Composer package management utility. Composer allows you to quickly and easily install the PHP modules that you need without having to worry about managing all of their dependencies. Likewise, Composer will automatically keep all of your packages updated, when maintainers publish new versions.

To simplify use of Composer, we are going to install it globally, so that you can run it from most any directory in the terminal/shell. (The Laravel installation instructions have you install Composer specifically for your Laravel project, but that’s usually not necessary.) We won’t go over all of the details for install Composer, because the Composer web site has simple, yet thorough instructions. Just go to the Composer Download page and follow the instructions. The only change to make to the given instructions is that on the third step, run the installer like this:

Since we are installing to the /usr/local/bin directory you must run this command as root user by using sudo.

The Composer installer will report the results and you should be able to verify successful installation by running composer in terminal/shell which should give you a list of all of the Composer commands.

Create your Laravel project in user directory.

Now we are ready to create our Laravel project, which installs all of the necessary files into a new directory. For this example, we will create our project in a user directory, which simplifies managing the permissions of the files and directories. Specifically, we’ll install to projects/laravel_project under our user’s home directory ($HOME). Here’s how to do it:

In this example, we are explicitly installing version 5.2 of Laravel framework, but you can choose any version; check this article for details. Also, we use the Composer --prefer-dist parameter to reduce the amount of data that must be downloaded.

After a few minutes, all of the necessary files will be downloaded and installed, including all of the dependencies. Composer should finish with the messages:

Of course, your application key will be different. And, as shown, you can always re-generate the key by running php artisan key:generate in your project directory.

To confirm that the installation succeeded, run:

cd laravel_project
php artisan

This should give you a list of the Artisan commands. Artisan is Laravel’s powerful built-in command-line utility, which simplifies many common development tasks. Check it out!

Set permissions for Laravel folders.

Another common pitfall in configuring Laravel on Linux is setting the appropriate permissions for a couple of the directories. Laravel needs to be able to write transient (temporary) data to some directories while it’s performing it’s magic, specifically the storage and bootstrap/cache directories. Run the following commands from the Laravel base project folder (e.g., $HOME/projects/laravel_project):

chmod -R 777 storage bootstrap/cache

Essentially, this sets “full access” permissions on these directories, so that no matter what process executes the Laravel application, it will be able to read from and write to them. Read more about Linux file permissions and how to manage them here.

Set up an Apache virtual host for your Laravel project.

Probably the one thing (from the developer’s perspective anyway!) that Nginx makes so simple compared to Apache is virtual host configuration. Virtual hosts is the web server terminology for allowing a single machine (host) to serve multiple web sites. For us, the main value is in allowing us to create an abbreviated name for our Laravel project. In addition, for Laravel, we actually must use a virtual host, so that we can properly set permissions for the project directories to avoid ‘403 Forbidden’ HTTP error, due to changes to default security settings in versions 2.4.3 and above of Apache server. See this article for more details.

In this step, we’ll create a new site configuration named laravel_project.conf which contains our named virtual host configuration. All of the files that we’ll be working with are system files owned by the root user, so we must use sudo command with all of them. Also, don’t feel obligated to use the nano editor; I just use it here, since it’s installed by default on Ubuntu Linux (and it’s a pretty good editor, too!).

In this file, replace /home/user with the name of the $HOME directory for your account on the machine. (This is the directory where you created the projects directory earlier.) Also, note that the root directory (DocumentRoot) is the public directory in your Laravel project folder. This is mainly for security as it means that the actually application files are stored in directories that the web server does not have access to. Finally, observe that we have specified that the TCP port that Apache will allow connections on (“listen” on) for the virtual host is 8080. This is a frequently used alternate port to the standard HTTP port of 80. We use 8080 to avoid conflicting with any other web applications already installed on your system.

Add new virtual host to hosts file.

You probably noticed in the previous step when setting up the virtual host configuration for our project, we specified laravel.dev as the ServerName. Basically, this is the “short” name for our virtual host. So, everything is set from the virtual host perspective to use this name. However, we need to configure our machine to recognize this name. To do this, we add an entry to machine’s hosts file. Open the hosts file:

After all of this, we are almost done! The last thing that we need to do is enable the virtual host configuration laravel_project.conf that we created above. To do this:

sudo a2ensite laravel_project.conf

You’ll be prompted to reload the Apache server process. However, before we do that, we (optionally) may want to disable the default Apache configuration. Again, if you have other web applications, such as phpMyAdmin, running on your machine, you do not want to disable this configuration. Otherwise, to avoid confusion, it probably makes sense to disable it:

sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf

Note that enabling (a2ensite) and disabling (a2dissite) don’t delete or otherwise change your configurations; they simply turn them “on” or “off”. (Basically, these utilities create or remove a symbolic link to the configurations in the /etc/apache2/sites-available directory to the same name in the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directory.)

Now, we are ready to restart Apache server and see if everything works! To restart the server:

sudo services apache2 restart

Now, open a web browser and enter http://laravel.dev:8080/ in the address field. You should see the standard Laravel landing page screen.

If you don’t see the landing page, then check that the above steps were performed correctly. Specifically, ensure that you have set permissions on storage and bootstrap/cache directories and that you have specified Require all granted in the section of laravel_project.conf.

These final two steps are entirely optional, but they can be helpful in setting up a fully-functional development environment.

In this step, we install the popular Node.JS JavaScript engine. Node.JS provides many great utilities, including supporting the Gulp task-runner/build utility used to process CSS and JavaScript files, which underpins the Laravel Elixir tool.

Previously, I have written about installing Node.JS from source code. However, using the official Node.JS PPA makes things a snap. To install Node.JS, do the following:

The script that is downloaded via curl sets up the Node.JS repositories and updates the repository cache, so you can proceed directly to installation.

To confirm that the install succeeded, check the versions of Node.JS and its companion NPM utility:

node -v
npm -v

[Optional] Create a MySQL (or SQLite) database to use with your Laravel project.

The final (optional) step in the process is to create a MySQL database for your project. Instead of showing all the details here, please refer to this article. It includes information about setting the database configuration details in the Laravel .env file so that Laravel can load them directly.

Summary

To wrap up this article, here are the steps with only the actual commands that you run to use as a quick reference.

When developing almost any application, you will need to have database of some type to store the data created and used by the application and its users. The most popular open-source database is MySQL. Of course, there are other well-known open-source database platforms, such as PostgreSQL and SQLite, as well as so-called NoSQL databases like MongoDB, since MySQL is ubiquitous, we’ll work with it.

Just as there are many different database platforms, there are many ways to interact with MySQL. There are web-based tools, like phpMyAdmin and Adminer, and regular client applications, such as DBeaver and SQuirrel SQL, all of which are free and open-source. I use and can recommend all of the tools mentioned. However, since you may not always have access to these tools, it’s always good to know how to use the default command-line/shell tools for MySQL.

To log into MySQL at the command line, enter this command:

mysql -uusername -ppassword

Note that there is no space between the -u and -p and the username and the password, respectively. (Technically, you can put a space between -u and username, but I find it difficult to remember which one you can and which one you can’t, so I just do them both the same way!) Assuming that you enter a valid username and password, you will be logged in and at the MySQL command prompt: mysql>.

All MySQL commands end with ; (semi-colon). To try things out, let’s look at the databases that you already have:

Every MySQL database server will have an information_schema and a mysql database. These databases hold metadata about the configuration of the MySQL instance itself. While you won’t often use these databases, you might want to know a little about them.

Let’s create a new database and grant privileges (permissions) to that database to a specific (new) user. I prefer to create a user with the same name as the database itself, but you can use any username that you like. For this example, we’ll the username will be different from the database name to avoid confusion. Of course, to maintain security, you should usually not use the MySQL root user for access to application databases.

After each command above, you should get a response message of Query OK followed by the number of rows affected (usually 0 or 1 for DDL commands like these). Also, if you get the message ERROR 1046 (3D000): No database selected when running the GRANT command, this means that MySQL doesn’t know what database you are referring to. You can execute USE `laravel`; to select the laravel database as the default.

Let’s look at the details of each of these commands in turn. The CREATE DATABASE command does just that: it creates a new database with the given name. Note that we included the name (laravel) in a pair of back ticks (`). While this isn’t absolutely necessary in most cases, it’s good practice since it allows you to use non-ASCII characters in the name. Likewise, we specified the optional CHARACTER SET and COLLATE parameters. By using UTF8 character set, this ensures that our database can store non-ASCII characters properly. Essentially, we are making our database more flexible.

Next, we turn to the CREATE USER command. Obviously, this creates a new user in our database platform. However, initially, this user (laravel_user) can’t actually do anything (other than log into MySQL). The username should be contained in single quotes (') [not back ticks!). Also, you are probably wondering about the @'%' following the username. This defines the scope of accessiblity for this user and % essentially means that this user can connect to the database from any host (machine). If you want to restrict connections to only the host where MySQL is running, such as in a development environment, you can specify @'localhost' (or @'127.0.0.1') instead of @'%'. Finally, the IDENTIFIED BY clause specifies the password (called authentication_string in MySQL terminology) for the user. In this case, we simply specify the actual password (s3cr3t) enclosed in single quotes. MySQL hashes passwords so that they are not stored in plain text in the database. You can see the hashed value for this user (laravel) by running:

Obviously, the actual value will (or should!) be different on your system.

Finally, we come to the GRANT command, which explicitly gives priveliges (permissions) to a user for certain databases or objects in a database. In this case the ALL specification means that all privileges (permissions) available are being given (“granted”) to the specified user. If you want to grant only certain permissions, such as to allow “read-only” access, you can specify any list of the other privileges, such as SELECT, CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE. (See MySQL documentation on GRANT for full list.) The specification after the ON indicates the scope of the privileges that are granted. In this case, by specifying `laravel.*`, we are granting these permissions to all objects (not only tables) in the laravel database. If you want to limit permissions to only a specific table, you could specify that, such as `laravel.user`. And, last but not least, the TO clause indicates which user (or users) these permissions should be given to. Again, the format of the user follows that of the format for CREATE USER. You can specify multiple usernames by separating each with a comma (,).

To log out of the MySQL command prompt, run:

mysql> exit;

Now, we have our database created and ready to use. In Laravel, you need to update the .env file in the root directory of your project with the appropriate parameter values to match your new database. Using the database above (and assuming that MySQL server is running on the same machine as our Laravel project), our settings would be:

Ubuntu has released the latest LTS (Long-Term Support) version 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) of their distribution. The official Ubuntu repositories include only PHP 7.0, since it is the official version (at the time of the 16.04 release). However, many developers still use PHP 5.5 or 5.6 in their production environments, so developing on these versions is frequently necessary. As usual, the PPAs come to our rescue for installing PHP 5.5 or 5.6 on Ubuntu 16.04. Here’s how.

First, we add the PHP 5 PPA maintained by Ondrej Sury and update the repository data on your Ubuntu installation:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get -y update

If you are familiar with these repositories, you’ll notice that the PHP version is not included in the PPA repository name. For Ubuntu 16.04, both PHP 5.5 and 5.6 are included in the PPA. (If you need PHP 5.4 or earlier, you’ll need to stay with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr.)

Now, we can install both PHP 5.6 (or 5.5) and 7.0, along with support for Apache 2 and MySQL, including various PHP modules, such as those required for Laravel framework:

As with any LAMP installation on Ubuntu, you’ll be prompted for the administrator (root) password for MySQL. Also, note that the package for XDebug (php-xdebug) does not include a version, since it supports both PHP 5.6 (or 5.5) and 7.0. Most other packages are PHP version-specific. If you aren’t sure, just enter part of the name on the apt-get command line and press <Tab> to see the various options.

Once we have PHP 5.6 (or 5.5) and 7.0 installed, we can easily switch between them from the shell using these commands. To enable PHP 5.6 (and disable PHP 7.0) use this command:

Now, you can just run phpv5 or phpv7 to switch to PHP 5.6 or PHP 7.0, respectively.

In the commands above to switch/re-start PHP versions, the update-alternatives command is used switch the version of PHP that is used when running PHP from the shell/command line. This is especially important when using PHP command-line tools, such as Composer and the Laravel Artisan commands.

Update

If you run into problems starting Apache 2 web server (sudo service apache2 restart) with the error “Apache is running a threaded MPM, but your PHP Module is not compiled to be threadsafe. You need to recompile PHP.”, then run the following commands in Ubuntu:

After upgrading (or installing) version 1.0.0-beta1 of Composer, I found that I was unable to successfully create a new Laravel project using composer create-project command. It appeared that everything was successful, but the dependency resolution process fails with this error message (or similar) when running the command composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel "5.1.*" --prefer-dist:

[RuntimeException]
Error Output: PHP Warning: require(/home/vagrant/laravel/bootstrap/../vendor/autoload.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/vagrant/laravel/bootstrap/autoload.php on line 17
PHP Fatal error: require(): Failed opening required '/home/vagrant/laravel/bootstrap/../vendor/autoload.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php') in /home/vagrant/larave/bootstrap/autoload.php on line 17

Upon investigation, you’ll find that this line is trying to load autoload.php from the Laravel (Composer) vendor directory, but that the vendor directory does not yet exist. There is some discussion and debate on GitHub Composer project issue #5066 about whether this is a Composer problem or Laravel problem. However, it does not seem clear about whether or not there will be a fix for the issue.

In the meantime, you can work around the problem by reverting to version 1.0.0-alpha11 (or earlier) version of Composer to return the previous behavior. To do so, follow the usual instructions on the Composer site for command-line installation, except when running php composer-setup.php (or sudo php composer-setup.php on Linux), use the --version option to specify version 1.0.0-alpha11 (or earlier). For example:

Subsequently, you should be able to run composer create-project to create your new project.

After you have created your project, you can upgrade to the later version of Composer, using composer self-update, but, of course, you’ll have to revert to version 1.0.0-alpha11 (or earlier) the next time you create another project. Nevertheless, for doing updates to existing projects, such as adding packages, the later version works fine.